Sports teams have embraced social media with varying degrees of enthusiasm in recent years; and, being curious types, we wondered who were the “social elite” of British ice hockey? So we researched the numbers to find out.

We took a slapshot snapshot of the social media standings of each team in the UK’s Elite League in early June 2011, and tallied their Twitter followers and Facebook “likes” to produce a popularity total for each. From these data we produced the chart below.

Belfast Giants are clear winners, thanks to their massive Facebook numbers; but they place only third on the Twitter measure.

Interestingly (or not), teams near the top tend to have higher Facebook totals, while those towards the bottom tend to be skewed towards Twitter. In essence, there’s much less variation in Twitter followers, but a wide disparity on Facebook.

It’s a crude measure, of course – but it is a measure at least. Unfortunately, the picture is blurred by the fact that some teams also have personal profiles on Facebook. We’ve produced a separate table for those clubs, based on their number of friends.

What does this tell us? Well, every team in the UK’s top league is using social media to engage with fans – and that must be good news for a sport which needs its supporters to help pay the bills.

As out guest blogger Jerry Iwanus pointed out in his recent post on the CFL and social media, small leagues which can’t rely on vast TV income, depend on their fans and therefore need to engage with them.

If nothing else, this modest research exercise suggests that most clubs in the Elite League recognise that.

Our thanks to the guys at Dirty Dangle for permission to use their Twitter goalie artwork in our intro.

If you are involved in ice hockey or other sports, and need help with social media or other communications, please bear us in mind.